(Disclaimer: I'm a big fish with under 200K GRC, so I'm definitely self-interested, but I am not a whale.:) And this may be a little rambling...)
I'm definitely in favor of fixed-block PoS rewards.
To play devil's advocate slightly, I think people who feel that there was some unfairness during the migration from the classic coin to the current coin aren't upset about the "reverse split" generally. The complaint is that the max block reward for researching decreased fairly quickly from almost 500 GRC per block down to the current 50 GRC/block (and the proof-of-stake interest rate declined from 9% to the current 1.5%) over the course of roughly 1 year between the end of 2014 and the end of 2015.
So essentially, they're arguing that people who are starting to BOINC now are getting massively-decreased research rewards compared to those who were crunching at the end of 2014, and thus argue that it amounted to some sort of "premine" and we need to radically alter or redistribute wealth on that basis.
I think it's completely silly, since the coin ran for over a year before the algorithms were changed and the price was ludicrously low until very recently. You can still acquire a full percent (~1% - 4 million GRC) of the entire GRC supply for less than $300,000 USD as we speak, at current prices and liquidity on Poloniex . Good luck doing that with most other coins (and I feel that any suggestion that institutional investors aren't buying because they can't purchase a 20-30% stake of GRC to be laughable -- many other coins with larger supplies and higher prices have even less liquidity available than Gridcoin right now).
It does feel to me like most of the complaining is coming from people who are upset that they can't catch up with "whales" in a year or two simply by mining GRC. Personally, I think this is incredibly entitled and you shouldn't expect to have dozens of people acquiring whale-sized stakes without having to spend a penny on an exchange, especially on a nearly four-year-old coin.
That said...it's a complicated subject and people are pretty passionate about Gridcoin, which I consider a good thing even if it results in heated battles. I just think it's more important to focus on fixing the existing reward mechanisms so that it continues to attract new blood than to waste time trying to figure out how to "punish" the whales,who have supported this coin since its inception.
Without knowing the size of everyone's wallet in a conversation, I think the main argument many people are making about "whales" is not that new users want to equal the stake of early adoption whales, but that after two years, for example, of being the "worker (BOINCer)" of gridcoin, that worker will have just about the same weight as they did when they started: 0. Stake is currently a representation of an individual's total Gridcoin holding. Weight is currently a combination of mag+stake with an emphasis on stake.
This means that the mag-weight of all BOINCers can never compete with that of the stake-weight of a single whale, let alone a pod of whales. This means that for a poll to pass, it must convince only the whales.
One could argue ad nauseam about "economic majority" -- let the whales carry all the weight as they will never vote against the best interest of the economic value of the coin. Unfortunately, this leads to trouble, as we can see with the segwit fallout in the bitcoin community: contemporary economics is short term and what's good for the short term economy is not necessarily good for the long term endeavor.
Question: As early adopters will likely never face competition with regards to their stake-weights -- unless someone drops a large sum of money into the market -- at what point will stake-weight mean less and mag-weight mean more? Or at the very least, what can we do to ensure that mag-weight has more weight than it does right now when it comes to deciding the overall direction of Gridcoin?
I think that the, under its current definition, stake-weight of whales should be easily overpower should enough workers band together. If a whale has mag-weight as well, they will benefit from this sort of protocol as well.
I want to stress: From what I've heard of the conversation, no one is going after whales with pitchforks. No one doubts that there are whales that produce value for Gridcoin as a whole. However, people have legitimate concerns about whether these whales will put into place structures which consolidate their power, known as centralization, or structures which return power to groups of people, or decentralization. In other words, will they hold onto the power they have right now, power which they have earned and deserve, or as the community grows, will they help spread power to those who contribute to the project at large.
Edit: I also want to stress that right now Stake = Money = Power. There are other ways to define Stake. Production value, for example. So when I say "spread power" I do not necessarily mean "distribute gridcoin." I mean "power" as defined here:
When it comes to organization, power is the ability to make decisions, act on these decisions, allocate funds, prescribe priorities, and define the overall vision of an endeavor.
I have certainly seen arguments that people think the coin distribution is unfair, not merely the weight for voting. As for voting, I'm happy to concede that our voting system could use some work and I'm totally in agreement that we need an actual governance structure of some kind. I'm just not at all upset by the coin distribution itself, unlike some people.:)
when you say coin distribution, do you mean when the coin was initiated or do you mean the current stake of each individual?
@nateonthenet and I have spent a fair bit of time on Reddit recently debating with some former Gridcoiners who feel (and I'm oversimplifying this of course) that we should be distributing far more coin to miners than we currently do AND that we should continue to scale that upwards with the growth in miners . This individual has said he believes inflation is a non-factor. Now, I've learned and accepted over time that this individual is an astute guy so I'm not going to be too arrogant and say he's just absolutely wrong, but I have a lot of doubts that we could double or triple the PoR rewards with little/no impact to the value of the coin. It just goes against everything I know and believe.
As for the voting weight issue. Again I'm just not convinced that it needs wholesale changes. I think 1 GRC should always equal 1 vote. I could be convinced, I think, that it should be possible for the best cruncher, for example (@NeuralMiner I think, currently), to have a mag voting weight that is at least equal to that of the largest whale's stake voting weight. Kinda balance the power that way so that being "rich" in stake doesn't give someone any more power than having an especially high magnitude.
But others disagree with even that. I've seen erkan refer to people with high magnitude as "a different kind of rich" and they don't like those folks having high voting weights either.
The vote weight was recently (within the last year I think?) changed to give GRC balance higher weight vs mag. I think that was a mistake.
In my opinion, mag should be given equal vote weight to balance. In votes regarding the whitelist (which is probably the most common vote we have), which affect crunchers much more than bag holders, it doesn't seem right to have bag holders have greater weight than someone that crunchers the actual projects every day. It's like me telling you what groceries to buy for you to make your food out of.
Secondly, bag holders have no expense. They turn on their wallet, they stake; that's it. Crunchers, in order to keep their mag up (which means their vote weight), need to pay for electricity, hardware upgrades, etc. I turn off my machine for a month, my mag vote will mean nothing, but my balance will still have the same weight. Having a mag voting weight has an associated cost. Having an investor voting weight does not.
Just my opinion.
I'm with you 110% @neuralminer.
I tried to start up a whitelist poll using only Mag, and everyone got all upset because that's not normally the way it's done. People kept saying "you can't exclude the investors."
Well we're not excluding the investors. We're excluding the people who invest and do not mine at all. And that makes perfect sense for a whitelist poll.
And now we have a whitelist poll to include a project that's neck and neck between "Yes" and "No" and there's a No vote from an investor account with a 3-million weight. That project might not get added now, and unless something changes drastically, you could remove that one single vote (or both of the Investor-only votes in that poll) and it would reach a different conclusion when only looking at miner votes.
What I hope those people are proposing does not effect inflation. They are talking about the relation between POS reward and DPOR reward. The DPOR reward is set at 48000 per day divided among every single miner. This means that as GRC gains more miners, each miners payout decreases. POS, on the other hand rewards 1.5%/year. That never changes. This means that whales/stakers are consistently getting 1.5% no matter their number while the reward for miners is continually decreasing. There are a few solutions floating around that somewhat solve this issue, but I have not yet seen something that gets to the root disparity of reward.
If these people are in fact just proposing just minting more coins to give to miners, then yes, that's inflationary and counter-productive.
It's hard to talk about without a link or a quote = )